The marijuana industry wants us to believe pot can solve the opioid crisis. So a medical marijuana company called Weedmaps has purchased billboards in several cities proclaiming “states that legalized marijuana had 25% fewer opioid-related deaths.”
That assertion comes from a 2014 study by Marcus Bachhuber and others, but it doesn’t mean medical marijuana actually prevents opioid overdoses. If that were true, opioid-related deaths would have steadily decreased after Arizona’s medical marijuana law took effect in 2011, and they didn’t.
Before the law passed, the opioid death rate in Arizona was falling, but after the law kicked in, that changed. Between 2012 and 2016, opioid deaths increased by 74.6 percent.
Nearly 800 Arizonans died of opioid overdoses in 2016, according to the Arizona Department of Health Services. This is a statewide tragedy. While the largest number of deaths occur in Phoenix and Tucson, the highest rates are found in rural Arizona, in places like Eloy, Bisbee and Quartzsite.
In other words, marijuana is not saving us from the opioid epidemic.
This is not surprising. The 2014 Bachhuber study never claimed that marijuana caused a decrease in opioid deaths. It only found that the two are correlated. As statisticians often remind us, correlation does not equal causation — a fact the Bachhuber study acknowledged but marijuana’s defenders gloss over.
So what is causing the decrease in opioid overdoses? A 2015 Rand Corporation study gives us a big clue. When their researchers adjusted Bachhuber’s calculations for race and unemployment rates, the difference between medical and non-medical marijuana states became insignificant.
Other scientists have also linked opioid deaths to employment and race. According to Brookings Institute research published this year, middle-aged white men with no college degree are dying in unexpectedly high numbers, especially from opioid overdose. These are the non-Hispanic white Americans who feel society has left them behind. They’re often out of work or under-employed. And they tend to live in non-medical marijuana states.
Oklahoma, Indiana, Ohio, West Virginia and much of the South have some of the lowest rates of college education and some of the highest rates of opioid use in the country. None have legalized medical marijuana.
In contrast, three-fourths of the medical marijuana states were in the half of the country with the highest rates of college graduates.
So medical marijuana states have fewer opioid overdoses because they have fewer non-college educated white men. It has nothing to do with marijuana.
Other research has come at this issue from the opposite direction — does marijuana increase the risk of opioid addiction? — with disquieting findings. A study published this summer in the American Journal of Psychiatry found that teenage marijuana users were twice as likely to progress to opioid abuse.
I see this at work. My heroin-addicted patients almost all used marijuana in their early teens.
And there are far more teenage marijuana users in medical marijuana states. According to the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, the 20 states with the highest rates of teen use all have medical marijuana laws.
So thanks to medical marijuana and legalization laws, the country has far more teenage marijuana users, and these kids are far more likely to get addicted to drugs like oxycodone and heroin. Legalized marijuana makes the opioid epidemic more severe and more intractable.
But in a classic case of pouring gasoline on a raging fire, the pot lobby is trying to convince us that loosening marijuana laws is the cure.
———
Dr. Ed Gogek is a psychiatrist specializing in substance abuse and the author of “Marijuana Debunked: A handbook for parents, pundits and politicians who want to know the case against legalization.” www.marijuanadebunked.com
